Doug Aitken sings the earth and cosmos electric in a mid-career retrospective that could be a Pick of the Year exhibition. The Geffen space, which has never looked better, was entirely made over for the show – an immersive odyssey to mirror Aitken’s own process with its infinite expansion or compression of the moment, convergence of microcosm and macrocosm, and sense of harmonic decay. MOCA Director, Philippe Vergne has plotted a spriraling labyrinth for almost 20 years of Aitken’s architectural/sculptural/experiential multi-screen installations, along with various photographs, lightboxes, collages, sculptures and other objects that are its connective tissue; an emblematic road map to Aitken’s process, that invite the viewer to plot her/his own variably paced and idiosyncratic dance with the infinite (or the void), or another dimension altogether. Vergne sums it up brilliantly in his catalog essay: “This sense of pacing, of interrupted moments, of shifting and floating is simultaneously a summary of a narrative and the negation of that narrative.”

The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA
152 N. Central Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90012
Show runs thru January 15, 2017